Self-Archive
Unto Others
as Ye Would Have them Self-Archive Unto You

Stevan
Harnad

Graphics: Tim Brody

Scholars and scientists
do research
to create new knowledge so that other scholars and
scientists can use it to create still more new knowledge and to apply
it to improving people's lives. They are paid to do research, but not
to report their
research: That they do for free, because it is not royalty-revenue
from their research papers but their "research impact" that pays their
salaries, funds their further research, earns them prestige and prizes,
etc. "Research impact" means
how much of a contribution your research makes to further research:
Do other researchers
read, use, cite, and apply your findings? The
more they do, the higher your
research impact. One way to measure
this is by counting how many researchers
use and cite your work in
their own research papers. Well,
it should be obvious that since research papers are rather like
advertisements -- they bring rewards the more they are read and
used -- and since researchers give them away, then any barriers
that deny access to potential users of this give-away research are a
bad thing -- for research, researchers, and the society that funds
the research and benefits from its findings.

Yet barriers do deny access to
research
papers. Tolls (in the form of journal subscription/license fees)
must be paid by researchers' universities for access to the journals in
which the research is published; otherwise uptake is blocked. Yet the
authors don't seek or get the revenue from those access-tolls: They would
much prefer it if there were no tolls at all, so that all would-be readers
could use their research, and thereby maximize its impact. In the old days of on-paper publication,
access-tolls were unavoidable, because of the real and sizeable costs of
printing and distributing the paper. But today, in the on-line age, that
can all be done for almost nothing, on the Web. Yet access-blocking tolls
are still being charged. Why?

It's nobody's fault. Research journal
publishers are still stuck in the old system. Every journal now has both
an on-paper edition and an on-line edition, and those who can afford it
are paying high tolls for access to one or the other or both. Besides,
most other kinds of authors are not like researchers: they do want to be
paid royalties out of the sales of their writing, so the toll barriers
suit them just fine. The special case of research papers is just a tiny
and unrepresentative minority
in the world of writing and its
economics. So what are researchers --
who want
only research impact -- to do? The toll-booths deny access to
all those potential users worldwide whose universities can't afford to
pay them -- and journals are so expensive that most universities can't
afford most journals (there are 20,000 research journals in all). Lost
access means lost impact: lost research productivity, progress,
applications, benefits. Yet if the
publishers cannot or will not make their research accessible for free on
the Web, why can't the researchers do it for themselves? They all have
web sites. And their research papers are all in electronic form. Why
don't they just put them all up on the web for free?

That is
what the "self-archiving initiative" is doing: Self-archiving -- http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
-- is one of the two open-access strategies of the Budapest Open Access
Initiative
(BOAI) -- http://www.soros.org/openaccess/
-- a growing international body of researchers across all fields, funded
by the financier George Soros, and dedicated to making the entire research
literature openly accessible to everyone online. To self-archive research
is to deposit it in the researcher's own university "Eprint Archive" -- http://www.eprints.org/
-- (eprints are
electronic versions of
research articles). The other BOAI open-access strategy
-- http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
-- is to create new open-access journals, in place of the toll-access
ones.
But 20,000 journals is a large number to replace one by one,
so self-archiving
will probably need to come first. By self-archiving their papers in
their own
university's Eprint Archives, researchers not only make them openly
accessible to all potential users worldwide (which is their only real
goal
in doing so), but they also create competition with the toll-access
version
sold by the journals in which the research appears. No one
knows what effect
that competition will have: The open-access version
and the toll-access version might continue to co-exist indefinitely,
with those whose universities can afford the toll-access version
using that, but those who cannot using the open-access version. Or the
open-access version may shrink the demand for the toll-access version,
so the journals have to downsize, cut their costs, and become open-access
journals. How much can journals
downsize? They can jettison the paper edition; they can even jettison
the on-line edition, leaving the archiving and distribution entirely
to the university Eprint Archives. But there is one essential function
that they will always have to perform, and that is called "peer review":
Peers are qualified experts who evaluate research before it is published,
to check errors, recommend revisions and advise the editor whether it
meets the quality standards for publication. The surprise is that the
peers, like the authors, do what they do for free too! So the only real
expense is administering the peer review. And that is what the journals
have to keep
on doing, because researchers cannot peer-review and certify
their
own work: Quality-control always has to be out-sourced to a reputable,
neutral third party (between the researcher and the
peer-reviewers). The good news
is that, per article,
the cost of administering peer review is much
less than what is being paid
in the combined tolls today by all the
universities that can afford to subscribe
to the journal in which that
article appears: Peer review alone costs less
than a third of the tolls
that are currently restricting research impact to those few would-be
users whose universities can afford them. Yet the solution is also
clear: If and when the subscribing universities are no longer spending
all that money they spent annually on tolls to access the research output
of other universities,
they will easily be able to pay publishers the peer-review costs for
their own research output out of only a third of their
annual windfall toll-savings. That way, the essential costs get paid
and the research is all openly accessible. And all it needs to make
it happen
is reciprocal self-archiving by universities, according
to the Golden Rule:
"Self-archive unto others as ye would have them
self-archive unto you." For even
if universities keep on paying journals the exact same tolls they pay
now for many years to come, self-archiving will have freed all the new
knowledge that scholars and scientists create, so that all other scholars
and scientists can already use it to create still more new knowledge
and to apply it to improving people's lives.